Mexican immigrants

SIGNIFICANCE:Mexican immigrants represent the largest minority ethnic group in the United States and differ from other immigrant groups in the nearness of their home country, which makes moving back and forth easier and makes their culture more visible within American society.

Mexico was originally inhabited by Indigenous peoples who originated in Asia many millennia before the first European explorers and settlers arrived in the Western Hemisphere. They developed advanced cultures that gave rise to civilizations such as those of the Aztec and Maya in what are now Mexico and Central America, which were responsible for impressive achievements in technology and mathematics. These civilizations were eventually conquered by Spain during the early sixteenth century. The Spanish introduced their language and the Roman Catholic religion to the original inhabitants of Mexico. Over time, the newcomers mixed with the Indigenous peoples and created the mestizo, or mixed-race, peoples who would become known as modern Mexicans.

Spanish Mexico, or New Spain, extended well into the southwestern parts of what is now the United States, and those regions became part of Mexico when that country won its independence in 1821. However, American settlers wrested Texas from Mexico during the 1830s, and the American victory in the Mexican War of 1846–48 cost Mexico the present-day states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of what would become other US states. In one stroke, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that settled the war transformed about eighty-five thousand Mexican citizens into the largest minority ethnic group in US territory.

Push-Pull Factors

Beginning in 1910 with the building of the railroad across the Sonoran Desert, the first wave of Mexican migration was ushered in with the flow of Mexicans “pushed” by the lack of jobs in Mexico under the president-dictator Porfirio Díaz. Moreover, the large-scale irrigation project of the Colorado Desert in California allowed agriculture to become a lucrative business in the Southwest. Many Mexicans were enticed to the area for jobs in agribusiness, where fruit and vegetable pickers were required in the San Joaquin Valley of California, the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and the Salt River Valley of Arizona. In addition, similar agribusinesses created jobs for picking sugar beets in Minnesota, Colorado, and Michigan. Besides the sugar beet, Michigan’s car industry drew Mexican workers toward the assembly lines of Detroit, where in 1914, Henry Ford paid a daily wage of five dollars.

Another factor pushing Mexicans to go north was the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910 and kept Mexico in a state of virtual civil war into the late 1920s and devastated the country. In the face of violent upheavals, unemployment, and hunger, as many as two million Mexicans may have immigrated to the United States by the late 1920s. During the year 1923 alone, an average of one thousand people crossed the border every day.

World War I

In August 1914, World War I began in Europe, pitting Germany against Great Britain, France, and other nations. The United States remained neutral, but in early 1917, an incident involving Mexico occurred that helped to draw the United States into the war. Germany’s foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmerman, sent a telegram to Mexico’s president Venustiano Carranza in which he offered Germany’s pledge to restore to Mexico the US states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in return for Mexico’s cooperation with Germany in the event that the United States entered the war. The telegram was intercepted by the British, who passed it along to the US government. The government had the contents of the telegram published in newspapers across the United States. In addition to helping President Woodrow Wilson take the United States into the war, the telegram helped launch a new era of American distrust of Mexicans.

Later that same year, the US Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, which imposed an eight-dollar head tax on each immigrant—a hefty impost on Mexican immigrants. The new law also added a literacy test, which made it even more difficult for many Mexicans to enter the United States legally. However, although American suspicions of Mexicans were high, the US entry into World War I created a worker shortage in the United States that forced American employers to look to Mexico for labor. After relaxing the literacy requirement and the head tax, the US Department of Labor set up a system with the agribusiness companies, in which each company could apply for the number of Mexican laborers it required, thereby creating a government-controlled guest-worker program. This arrangement differed from later bracero programs in that it did not guarantee worker protections or wage increases. To ensure that Mexican workers returned to Mexico, the Labor Department held part of their pay until they were back in Mexico.

Repatriation

The 1920s saw the first major wave of Mexican immigration, but after the stock market crash of 1929 started the Great Depression, those numbers began reversing. Mexicans became the scapegoats for job losses in the United States, and impoverished American farmers in the Midwest, which was devastated by dust bowl conditions, began migrating west in search of seasonal agricultural work that had previously been done mostly by immigrants. By 1934, more than half of California’s crop pickers were White American migrant workers.

Meanwhile, additional resentment fell on American citizens of Mexican descent who were receiving federal benefits in New Deal programs during the Depression, and Mexican Americans were blamed for using taxpayer money. The federal government came under pressure to send Mexicans back to Mexico. Deportation required time-consuming legal proceedings, so the government engaged in tactics designed to intimidate Mexicans into leaving the country voluntarily. However, in 1931, the government began instituting legal proceedings to deport Mexicans who were found to have violated the conditions of their visas.

In February 1931, agents of the US Department of Labor began staging public raids across California’s Los Angeles County, using local police to help identify Mexicans. Persons who could not produce documentation of their American citizenship or valid passports were bused to the Mexican border. In their haste to round up suspected Mexican nationals, government agents sent some American citizens and persons of Asian ancestry to Mexico.

The mass deportations had the desired effect of creating the fear of expulsion in the minds of Mexican immigrants, many of whom began accepting offers of free passage to Mexico. Eventually, Los Angeles set up county-sponsored trains that provided free transportation to all the Mexicans who wished to leave the country voluntarily. Many of those sent to Mexico were later unable to prove their American citizenship, which they consequently lost.

Bracero Program

After the United States entered World War II at the end of 1941, Mexican workers were again persuaded to migrate north to fill jobs left by American workers who had entered the armed forces or gone to work in the expanding defense industry. Since 1917, the Mexican government had tried, with little success, to ensure that Mexicans working in the United States would receive better treatment. By 1942, however, the US government was finally ready to pay attention to the Mexican demands. In July 1942, the US and Mexican governments signed an accord in Mexico City to create the bracero program, in which the US government would take responsibility for overseeing and protecting Mexicans working in the United States under the program. Between 1942 and 1947, more than two hundred thousand bracero workers were employed across the United States; more than half of them worked in California’s agricultural fields.

Criticisms of the bracero program soon emerged. Most of the conditions for workers that Mexico had set were not met. Substandard housing of the workers was a particular problem, but this was remedied in 1943 when new housing units were built by the federal government. Another criticism was the failure of wage rates to increase along with those in areas where braceros were not working, such as Texas. Another criticism of the program was that it encouraged illegal immigration by workers who did not return to Mexico when they completed their contracts. When the program was finally ended by the US government in 1964, Mexico was left with the problem of having large numbers of workers who needed employment.

Operation Wetback

During the early 1950s, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was urged by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to begin deporting illegal immigrants. In June 1953, the INS began a series of surprise raids in the program dubbed “Operation Wetback.” The program continued into the following year and was publicized. In contrast to the mass repatriations of the early 1930s, the INS made sure that the people sent back to Mexico were released at points five hundred to one thousand miles south of the border to discourage them from returning to the United States. Once again, many of the people who were deported were American citizens, and again families were torn apart by the deportations. At least three hundred thousand people were returned to Mexico, and as many as one million more were stopped from entering the United States at the border.

Anti-Mexican Sentiments

Stereotypes about “wetbacks”—a derogatory term for illegal Mexican immigrants—stealing American jobs were perpetuated in political circles, and they increased in frequency during economic recessions. Like members of other immigrant groups, Mexicans were often stereotyped as scofflaws and miscreants. At ports of entry along the border, Mexicans were historically forced to undergo humiliating body searches. Moreover, Mexican border posts were the only ports of entry into the United States that forced new arrivals to undergo delousing. During the swine flu outbreak in 2009, fears of Mexicans bringing the disease over the border were common throughout the United States, with many Americans renewing calls for the erection of a border wall.

Anti-Mexican sentiment was inflamed and debated throughout the country from the beginning of Republican nominee Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2015. Upon announcing his candidacy, he gave a speech that emphasized illegal immigration as a major issue for his campaign to "make America great again," specifically citing Mexican immigrants as the largest source of complications for the United States' economy and society. In controversial comments, he generally labeled Mexican immigrants as criminals and even rapists. To rectify the situation, he vehemently suggested plans to increase deportations and construct a large wall along the US border with Mexico, claiming that Mexico would be responsible for funding the project. Initial polls revealed that many Republicans supported Trump's philosophy and proposal to build a wall, while most Democrats were opposed. After Trump was officially named the Republican presidential candidate in 2016, he continued to defend his staunch determination to crack down on illegal immigration, with a focus on Mexicans. Despite a trip to Mexico in August 2016 in which he met with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, who voiced the country's opposition to his views, Trump returned to firmly promoting the building of the wall and denouncing illegal immigrants in subsequent speeches.

By the end of Trump’s presidency, 458 miles of border wall had been completed. Immediately after President Joe Biden took office in 2021, however, he signed legislation that halted all construction on Trump’s attempt to erect a border wall between Mexico and the United States. Yet, Trump, elected to a second term in office in 2024, promised to recommit his efforts to building the border wall and initiating the largest deportation program in American history, targeting immigrants living in the US illegally. He further planned to significantly enhance border security, including increased funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and additional border agents.

The legacy of Mexican immigration to the United States thus remained a major source of debate in the early 2020s. In 2022, there were 10.6 million individuals born in Mexico living in the United States. About 4 million of those were undocumented. Mexico contributed more immigrants than any other country to the United States—making up 23 percent of all immigrants living in the US in 2022—though the Mexican share of the US immigrant population had fallen since the early 2000s. In fact, encounters with migrants from Mexico (as well as many other countries) along the US-Mexico border began to fall drastically in 2024, even before Trump was reelected to the presidency. Between late 2023 and late 2024, encounters between US Border Patrol and Mexican citizens decreased by 52 percent. This was attributed largely to an executive order signed by Biden in June 2023 that made it more difficult for migrants to seek asylum in the US, as well as increased enforcement from Mexico that prevented many migrants from reaching the border with the US.

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